


Scavenger Babies

by JeanLuciferGohard



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Animal Death, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, F/F, Gen, Lesbians in Space, it's mountain goats o-clock motherfuckers, pretentious musings on the ~materialities~ of necromancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-10 03:17:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,465
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21453916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JeanLuciferGohard/pseuds/JeanLuciferGohard
Summary: Harrowhark Nonagesimus is ten years old when she reanimates her parents. Ianthe is six when she decides there's going to be two Third heirs. It's a hell of an upbringing for both of them.Or:Meat. Bones. Mountain Goats Lyrics.Harrow/Ianthe character study
Relationships: Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Comments: 8
Kudos: 93





	Scavenger Babies

**I. Prepare a Grave for Menelaus**

_ It never hurts to give thanks to the broken bones _

_ You had to use to build your ladder _

_ -Younger, The Mountain Goats _

Priamhark Noniusvianus is a tall man, and strong. His eleven year old daughter has none of the Reverend Father’s breadth, a monochrome sliver skulking at her father’s side. Three of his cervical vertebrae, C5-C7, are damaged beyond repair, and his left clavicle needs replacing. It makes his head list to one side, a grave, thoughtful tilt.

His wife walks with them, her delicate, mincing step the result of a deep crack in the medial malleolus of her right tibia, and a pitted gouge dug out of the associated talus. Pelleamena Novenarius is fine-boned and delicate, as befits nobility. Her ankle broke after only two months.

Harrowhark walks her parents to the bone pits.

Her father’s head lolls. Her mother’s ankle  _ crunches _ grotesquely with every step, so loud that somebody  _ must _ hear it, even in the depths of Drearburh’s ossuaries.

But no one does.

It takes almost nothing to keep it all a secret. Drearburh loves secrets.Drearburh accretes secrets like flies to a corpse. Drearburh holds it secrets safe under it’s oily, black tongue like an anorexic with a mint. Harrow skulks around in the guts of the Ninth with the ostentatiously stealthy tread of a child, and neither her own blacks not the blacks of her parents match the shadows even a little bit, and even then, nobody sees them, nobody hears, and if anybody  _ does _ , well.

The Reverend Family has dark deeds to attend to. They always do, that’s practically the whole point.

Harrow makes her parents kneel.

Her mother is easy, ankle coming apart like two halves of a rotten peach, with the ease of collapsing into a nervous breakdown. Priamhark is harder; her little hands can barely find the purchase they need, splayed as far as they can go on either side of her father’s face. It takes three or four  _ yanks _ before his head comes off.

She places it in his lap.

The damaged vertebrae are ridged with spurs and spikes in complicated, tumorous whorls. Their insides look like a face full of asphalt, spongy and gray with rot. Harrow’s mouth twists, turning them over and over in her fingers, bent low over the bones, sunk back into her heels in a low, feral crouch.

It should not be  _ these _ bones; it was C3 and C4 that severed Priamhark Noniusvianus’ spinal cord when he —

Harrow stands, snarling, and hurls them away. They clatter faintly when they land.

It wasn’t  _ enough _ .

The blackest, oiliest secrets of her House, and hours with mortuary wax and formaldehyde (Seventh Arts, and beneath her tiny dignity, but the faces had to hold up), and the effort of  _ cutting them down _ , and the months after, when their bodies started to go, too much effort to hold the faces  _ and  _ the rest of them, so she had to set the beetles on them, to clean the bones, and  _ that _ took weeks, and she had to keep  _ checking _ , and the  _ noise _ they made, that rustling chitter while they swarmed, and at least four distal phalanges on her mother’s hand just  _ vanished _ , and she had to go fishing for them, and it wasn’t  _ enough _ .

She picks over the bones.

Harrow sorts, mindlessly, separating phalanges from long bones, organizing vertebrae by size. Carpals. Ribs. Teeth. Drearburh loves its bones. Drearburh keeps its bones like people keep gardens. Drearburh loves bones like a hammer loves a nail. Drearburh has more bones than the quantum super-imposition of an orthopedic hospital and all possible taxidermists offices in the known universe. 

Drearburh has nothing she  _ needs _ . Not one skeleton is the right size.

Fists full of knuckle bones, Harrow thinks, _I could just _**_make_** _them_, and cups her hands together. Blood beads at her temples. Her palms are chalky and dry. 

It’s not enough.

Harrow opens her hands, and it all clatters through her fingers, pooling on the ground by her knees, half-formed processes and twisted lumps of calcium. She scrubs at her face with her sleeves, pushes back her bloody hair from her forehead.

She turns back to her piles.

Harrow picks over the bones.

* * *

**II. Omens in the Kitchen Sink**

_ Don’t really mind the ritual _

_ Just the smell _

_ -Tucson Fog, The Mountain Goats _

Babs’ latest present has long, rabbitty ears, and a round, kittenish belly, and it looks a little like one, and a little like the other, but mostly like it’s met the business end of some  _ serious _ landscaping equipment. Its tiny, heaving flanks are flecked pink with blood, eyes glassy and wild with pain.

Corona, of course, has bandaged one of its paws. It’s bleeding all over the bedroom carpet anyway.

Ianthe sighs.

Coronabeth still thinks she’s going to save one of them, and nurse it back to health, and it’s going to be her best friend, and sleep in her bed, and kill any one she tells it to. This is her fourth go at it, at least. 

Ianthe’s face screws up disgustedly. Ianthe is only twelve, and won’t get her own Third Adept’s knife until next _ year _ , so she has to use scissors instead. They flash in the late afternoon sun, blades tucked up under the crook of her wrist. Ianthe pins the handle between her last two fingers and the swell of flesh under her thumb, leaving her index and middle finger free to stroke over the poor little thing’s downy fur. To distract it like that, while it bleeds out, while she reaches out with her  _ other _ hand, and pins it down by the neck.

Ianthe thinks:

_ ‘And I took his flesh into my flesh, and, knowing him then as I knew myself, I saw. And understood. And I raised up my hand and brought forth of him who was my flesh a new creature’ _

Lycaon Triens, first of his House.

She flips the scissors in her hand, blades out.

It’s too weak to struggle much. Corona’s pets always are; Babs brings in the most forlorn, hopeless cases he can find, because Babs doesn’t know the secret yet, and neither does anybody else, and Ianthe snips a nice, big chunk out of its’ shoulder, and raises it to her mouth.

The meat is soft, and faintly sweet, melting almost like candy on her tongue. She barely even has to chew it. She does anyway, eyes closed in concentration. Ianthe presses the flat of her scissors to her lips, scraping a fleck of gore away from the corner of her mouth with her thumbnail. and knows the  _ exact _ second it dies.

Then she brings it back.

They’ll tell everybody Corona did it herself, and Corona will have to pretend to everybody else that it was always supposed to be a resurrection, not a rescue. Ianthe will keep pinching her awake during lessons, and stroking her hair at night to remind her that it  _ has _ to be like this, unless Corona wants to be sent away, unless Corona wants to be  _ all alone _ . Then Babs will bring another, and Corona will try to save  _ that _ one, too, and it’ll die, like they all do, and Ianthe will bring it back. Ianthe knows the taste of this by now, salty-rich and bitter.

She stands.

Whatever Babs’ present  _ was _ , it’s a Revenant  _ now _ , so it doesn’t resist at all when Ianthe gathers it to her chest, stashing her scissors inside her skirt and stroking its long, velvety ears. They’re still warm, and beautifully, translucently pink where the light hits them.

She finds Corona outside, doing something athletic and ridiculous, hair gleaming picturesquely like Ianthe’s never does.

Ianthe makes her cargo kick and wriggle, like it’s happy to see Coronabeth Tridentarius, its blessed saviour. She’s gotten good, Ianthe thinks, at overjoyed, animal ecstasy. Corona gasps delightedly, holding out her hands.

Her face falls almost immediately.

“He didn’t...?”

Corona’s eyes are teary and beautiful. Ianthe shakes her head.

“No, Beth. He didn’t make it.”

Ianthe gives them a moment. You have to give Corona a moment, or she cries, and the crying gives her a headache, and then she’s  _ useless _ . She lays her hand over her sister’s, and waits.

Then Ianthe says:

“Go on. Go show everybody what you did.”

Sniffling, Corona nods. 

They’ll have to lose this one in a week or two. It gets too hard to keep them moving when Corona insists on being independent, which a phase Corona goes through, sometimes.

Ianthe wishes she would stop.

They’re in this together.

* * *

**III. Looking at the Void and seldom blinking**

_ We scaled the hidden hills beneath the surface _

_ Scraped our fingers bloody on the stones _

_ -Dinu Lipatti’s Bones, The Mountain Goats _

Harrow considers her supplies.

White rouge and mineral oil for finishing. Three gauges of wire, black. Associated cutters. Four feet of chain. Eighty-one knucklebones, sixty-five phalanges, distal, medial and proximal, thirty-odd ribs, polished smooth. Two femurs, hollowed and sectioned. A constellation of teeth.

The teeth are the problem; her mother’s jewelry is mostly teeth, molars and bicuspids strung like pearls into long, delicate loops that click and sway when she walks. When Harrow  _ makes _ her walk. They drape the lines of her body like they were made for her.

Or they used to, anyway, when there was enough body left under her robes to pull off the effect. All of it made  _ for _ her, by nuns and Aunts and postulates. Lady Novenarius never lifted a finger. It would’ve been unimaginably crass. 

_ Probably why they didn’t do her any good, _ Harrow thinks, tossing her head dismissively.

Nobody would question it if the Reverend Mother announced tomorrow that she had decided to cast off her finery, that she might cast off worldly concern, and meditate more deeply on the holy charge bequeathed to her and her house. That her daughter would take up the Lady’s fine chains of teeth, as befit the dignity of the House. The Ninth stands on ceremony. It has to; the rest of the floors have all rotted away.

And anyway, the child’s bones she used to wear are too small now.

She gathers up a fistful of teeth, rattles them thoughtfully in her palm. Harrow considers the facts.

They aren’t  _ meant _ to be weapons, per se. Certainly her mother’s weren’t designed to be. It’s a substantial gamble; on the one hand, it’s a ready supply of bone for the necromancer on the go. On the other hand, if you were, say, Gideon Nav, and fast, you would step inside Pelleamena’s reach, get the sword up, and  _ yank _ , and everything would go flying, too far away to be of any use. If you were, say, a better bone adept, you could just choke her with her own necklace. 

There are no bone adepts better than Harrowhark Nonagesimus.

She considers the time.

It is just past vespers. Griddle turns fourteen in a little less than six hours. Griddle will undoubtedly try to escape off-planet again at this time, the way that other people throw parties. Conservatively, this gives Harrow maybe three hours at the outside to finish everything. Considering the delicacy that the work requires, a skilled bone adept would need something like eighteen.

She gives herself two.

Harrow closes her fist, crushing her handful of molars into a thick, gluey paste. Harrow pinches the fingers of her other hand, and draws it out into a long, thin spike. Thirty minutes in, her nose starts to bleed. An hour in, and blood-sweat streaks her temples, gluing down her hair. The wire strips her fingers. Harrow cracks open seams along grooves and fossae. Harrow makes her jewelry close-fitted, hard to tear away; femoral cuffs to brace her wrists, bracelets strangling her scrawny biceps, somebody’s dead hands wrapped around her throat.

_ Melodramatic. Stop it. _

Harrow blinks the blood from her eyes, grimacing and pulling a loose end of wire tight with a savage yank.

The rib corselet takes the longest, hinged at the back like a huge mouth, locked in the front with a ragged hook-and-eye clasp, and if nothing else, it’s incredible for her posture, even if it’s not especially likely to turn a blade. A rapier, maybe, but a two-hander like Griddle’s would crunch through it like a cheap piñata.

Which would send bone chips  _ flying _ , and if you were, say, the greatest bone adept Drearburh ever spat out of its spiny gullet, you could grow enough skeletons from all that to  _ fully _ gang-bang a moron with a two-hander to death before you bled out.

Harrow works her jaw back and forth. Stands.

As if on cue, the battered console built into the opposite wall _beeps_ wearily, and displays across its bruise-green LED a wavering, glitchy “_SHUTTLE CLASS IV ‘ANCHISES’ REQUESTING ENTRY_ _PLEASE CONFIRM.”_

Griddle never found the new authorization codes, then. 

It’s nothing personal. It’s just that Griddle is only other real person on Drearburh, and if Harrow can’t leave, neither can she.

Harrow cracks her knuckles, and prepares to ruin Gideon Nav’s birthday.

* * *

**IV. Eating the utterly inedible**

_ Smiling faces flawlessly rehearsed _

_ We are sleek and beautiful _

_ We are cursed _

_ -Slow West Vultures, The Mountain Goats _

Poor Babs has been trying all night.

It’s somebody’s birthday; Marta’s, maybe, or Judith’s. The Second House is  _ there _ , anyway, looking stern and dignified and well-marbled in their Cohort dress coats. The red of them is a rare, arterially bright flash, the white fatty and translucent, and they look, Ianthe thinks, like a pair of exquisitely trimmed steaks. Just as exhaustively well-bred and expensive as the meat on their plates, which has been shaved so fine you could read a book through it.

And Babs, the dear, has been trying to offer it to Corona  _ all night _ , spearing delicate ribbons off his own plate. Babs keeps offering up jewel-bright curls of meat. Opalescent slabs of fish, glistening unctuously with sauce.

Corona takes them. Corona takes one bite and hums distractedly, nodding along that it is, yes, very delicious. 

Corona says:

“Oh, that’s lovely! Ianthe, here, you try,” and passes the rest to her sister.

Ianthe chews with a delicate, feline relish. It really is very good.

What Babs fails to apprehend is that it’s been  _ years _ since Corona had a pet. That Corona is smart enough by now to know that even if he’s just the kind of pretty, lethal little thing she used to covet so desperately, keeping him would mean giving up what she  _ really _ wants. Beth would would chew him up and spit him out.

Ianthe would chew him up and swallow. That’s the difference between them. Coronabeth still favours him, like you would a bad knee. Corona still brushes her lips over the hinge of his jaw to wish him good luck as he stands, straight and trim and purple-gold, like a bruised peach, and offers Marta a calculated bow.

Ianthe only brushes his sword-hand with her fingertips as he walks away.

Cav match. It must be Judith’s birthday, then.

The Crown Princess of Ida calls out, “First touch, clavicle to sacrum, arms exception. Call,” her eyes glowing, because she’s always loved this sort of thing, and the Princess of Ida watches with lazy, half-lidded eyes (because she’s always been bored by this sort of thing) as Judith twitches her eyebrows meaningfully at her cavalier, who nods, and Ianthe thinks:

** _Poor_ ** _ Babs. _

He really is trying awfully hard.

Naberius Tern’s form is perfect. His sword and trident-knife fit his hands like he was born holding them. His every motion is beautifully economical, precise. He might be the best cavalier out of Ida in six generations.

Marta wipes the floor with him in about two minutes.

“Match to the Second!” 

Corona says, “Congratulations, Lieutenant,” and you would miss the outraged flare of her nostrils if you blinked for even a second.

Marta says, “He’s quite something,” with no inflection at all.

Ianthe says, “You honor us,” laying a hand on Corona’s arm to stop her from doing something  _ stupid. _ She’s not a cavalier. She never will be.

And Naberius says nothing, only pants a little, bleeding sluggishly from the mouth where his lip split open.

It’s been years since Corona had a pet.

She curls her hand gently around his jaw anyway, brushing her mouth softly over his. Kisses it better. It’s a light, airy thing, that lasts less than a second, and means nothing at all.

“Here,” she murmurs, turning his head, “Ianthe, you should — ”

Coronabeth passes him across to her sister.

Naberius Tern is fine-boned and clean-shaven. The hinge of his jaw slots neatly into Ianthe’s palm. His mouth tastes bloody, a thin, thready saltiness **, ** with notes of bitter melon and posturing. His lips are chapped.

“A little dry, don’t you think?” Ianthe murmurs, slanting her eyes at her sister. 

Corona sniffs.

“Oh, don’t be  _ horrid _ , Ianthe, it’s nothing a little balm won’t fix.”

* * *

**V. Name one thing about us two anyone could** **love**

_ I speak in smoke signals and you answer in code _

_ The fuse will have to run out sometime _

_ -Have to Explode, The Mountain Goats _

Ianthe’s room is always so  _ bright _ , fluorescents set at a perpetual, eye-watering eighty percent. It’s not the kind of light that’d do either of them any favours, washing Ianthe’s fairness out to a ghoulish translucence, and clotting like sour milk along the lines of Harrow’s makeup, carving out a matte weirdness everywhere it falls. But Ianthe keeps them dialed up because Ianthe likes to see her handiwork, the bitemarks purpling on Harrow’s throat, her collarbones, the point of her ribcage, the insides of her elbows and thighs. Ianthe likes to hold the gold-plated bones of her hand up to light and admire the slickness gleaming on her fingertips.

Typical Third House gaucherie.

“I always thought the Ninth was the least of us, you know,” she muses, working her skeletonized fingers back and forth. “No real talent. I mean, bones are so  _ simple _ . And you’re already missing all the important bits by skipping the butchering. I always thought it seemed...lacking.”

She hums, tucking herself back into Harrow’s side, hand draped proprietarily over Harrow’s chest.

“But this is nice! I like it. It suits me, don’t you think?” 

“I always thought,” Harrow murmurs, eyes closed, “that Ida was an ostentatiously tasteless, vulturine turd of a place.”

“That’s what I like about you, Harry. You’re so funny.” 

Ianthe laughs like a rich girl, all frothy, giggling condescension, petting delicately at Harrow’s throat. 

Poor Harrow.

She likes to pretend she’s above all this, like she doesn’t whine and push up into the touch. It’s why Ianthe keeps the lights dialed up so high, because Harrow’s face is  _ incredible _ like this, caught somewhere between wanting and disgust. Harrow comes with a wounded, outraged gasp like she can’t believe her own body would do this to her.

Typical Ninth, as if they aren’t just meat like everybody else.

Ianthe hums.

“Babs thinks we look nice together,” she purrs, pushing herself up on her good arm.

Harrow’s eyes slit open.

“Does he.”

“No,” Ianthe laughs again. “No, you would have offended his sense of aesthetics. Maybe without the paint — ”

She reaches up to thumb the paint from Harrrow’s mouth, and her hand  _ locks _ , bones quivering in place.

It’s harder to reach them under the metal, and harder still to stop them, but bone is bone, and the problem with the Third is that the Third was always too concerned with the flesh to learn to how to take a hit. 

“The Third,” Harrow intones, “has no aesthetics to speak of.”

And ‘Babs’, she knows, doesn’t talk to Ianthe. Ianthe is lying, because Ianthe never learned to exist without somebody to be better than, and this is what they do now: Ianthe pretends that she cares, and Harrow pretends that it hurts. Ianthe jabs, and Harrow lets her, and she keeps the lights too high, and Harrow nurses her hickeys and her migraines and sometimes they try to kill each other.

Maybe one day it’ll take.

“Oh, don’t  _ sulk, _ ” Ianthe huffs. “I always hated it when Beth got sulky. We’re better off together, and you know it.”

“I would rather contemplate the sight of my own entrails being pulled from my body than think for one second about what you think you know. I would rather swallow my own shattered teeth. I would rather — ”

Ianthe tips forward, all at once, cantilevered awkwardly by her frozen metacarpals. She cups the back of Harrow’s head with her warm, human hand, grazing teeth along the edge of Harrow’s jaw. Her lips are soft, and dry, and taste like salt.

Harrow’s fingers are just long enough to wrap once, completely, around each one of Ianthe’s wrists.

“Same time tomorrow?” Ianthe murmurs.

Harrow almost, but doesn’t quite nod.

Same time tomorrow.

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hit ya bitch up on [twitter](twitter.com/gin_n_chthonic) or [ tumblr ](tumblr.com/thefaustaesthetic)


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